Vorenus felt wet splatter his face as he drove into the man. Galbus fell backward, dropping his sword as his hands flew to his broken face, and Vorenus scrambled over him, skittering to stay on his feet and turn toward the legionnaries even as he unsheathed the gladius in his hand.
Khenti had two of the remaining legionnaires engaged, his curved blade already dripping with blood from the third, who was down on the ground, the hilt of a dagger protruding from beneath his jaw. The man’s legs were jerking in short spasms.
The Egyptian danced around to his left, face dispassionate, almost curious as he kept their attention. Vorenus took the opportunity to rush at the back of the Romans, his arm rocking backward and forward in a perfect gladius thrust, the kind he’d tried to teach Caesarion when the boy was younger. He aimed the strike for the open side in one legionnaire’s armor, and it slipped just below the man’s ribs and into his body with fluid, seamless ease, right down into the man’s pelvis.
The dying man slid off his blade, and Vorenus turned to see Khenti dispatch the one remaining soldier with a flash of metal that passed across his neck. The Egyptian twirled his sword and sheathed it, face as still as stone, before another dead Roman fell to the pavement.
Khenti motioned to the sprawled and gasping Galbus before Vorenus could say anything. “I can finish him quickly,” the Egyptian said.
Vorenus looked down at the man. His face was smashed and bloodied, his eyes wild. “Let him be,” Vorenus said.
The Egyptian just looked up, as if the answer didn’t matter one way or another. “Then we should leave,” he said.
Vorenus strapped on the gladius belt with practiced speed before they ran back to the trireme. The alarm had not yet been raised, and they had no difficulty dispatching the few Roman guards and readying the ship for sail based on Manu’s hand signals.
The oarsmen below were only too happy to set their backs into their strokes, and they’d already pulled them away from the dock and against the current by the time Romans began to spill out of the palace. They ran down the docks, sprinting up planks and onto Octavian’s bigger royal barge. Oars began to appear through the holes in its sides, extending out like hundreds of thin legs. With so many experienced men below its decks, the royal barge would easily overtake their poorly crewed boat.
“They’ll catch us,” Vorenus said, pointing out the obvious.
“Yes, they will,” Khenti replied.
The deck beneath them shook slightly as the oarsmen ceased rowing backward and began to drive forward with the current through the channel. Manu’s bearing was the fastest way to escape the island and would carry them directly toward the Heptastadion, but it would also take them right past the royal barge as it readied for the water. Already Vorenus could see legionnaires pulling bows on its deck. “We won’t even reach the bridge,” he said.
“I think perhaps we will,” Khenti said. Vorenus looked over at him, and he saw that the Egyptian was looking back toward Manu, who was just completing a series of signs. The captain’s face was beaming like a kid’s.
The trireme began to drive hard through the water, the oarsmen stroking with everything they had. Vorenus felt the current rolling beneath them, pushing them faster and faster. Manu turned the tiller slightly, grinning, and pointed forward.
Vorenus turned, saw the surprise on the Roman faces even before he realized what was happening. A few of them hurriedly released their drawn arrows before they dropped their bows and began to brace for impact. Most did not.
The thick metal ram at the head of their trireme, which had once split the side of Antony’s flagship at Actium, now slammed into the keel of Octavian’s barge, shuddering the full length of the bigger ship as it broke through the back end of it. Vorenus, who’d had no time to brace himself, rolled forward across the trireme’s deck amid a hail of fractured planks.
A few oarsmen and two legionnaires fell down onto their deck from the impact, which cut a gaping wound into the barge, as the trireme’s momentum barreled them onward and they tore the hole open even further. Vorenus heard the telltale roar of water beginning to rush into the larger ship’s hold even as he watched Khenti dancing through the rain of debris, sword spinning, efficiently dispatching the Romans who’d fallen onto the trireme’s deck and didn’t dive overboard fast enough.
By the time Vorenus had staggered to his feet, the decks were cleared and the barge was starting to sink in their wake. A few desperate arrows were falling into the water behind them, but the oarsmen already had them out of range. Khenti was walking toward him, sword put away, as calm as a man out for a stroll.
Vorenus smiled, feeling at last like maybe, just maybe, they might pull this off. Then he turned toward the first bridge of the Heptastadion looming ahead, just in time to see their destination erupt upward into the morning sky in a fiery roar of black-billowing smoke, broken wood, and shattered stone.
29
THE POWER OF A SHARD
ALEXANDRIA, 30 BCE
Out on the water ships were moving in so many directions it was dizzying. But none of them, for the moment, appeared to be heading toward the Heptastadion and the eight men and one woman huddled around the Ark of the Covenant in the quiet beneath its first bridge.
Caesarion watched it all with anxious anticipation. “He’ll come,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. “I know Vorenus. He won’t fail.”
“Aye,” Pullo said. Caesarion looked over his shoulder at the big man, who was standing with Jacob and Didymus on the other side of the Ark, just inside the gate to the underground canal. “I’d bet my life on him.”
“We don’t doubt your friend, but faster would be better,” Jacob said, a touch of his typical amusement in his voice.
“Oh, I don’t deny that,” Pullo said with a grin.
“We can only wait so long,” one of the four guards ringing the edge of the platform whispered to Hannah. Like his fellows, he had an arrow nocked on his bow as he scanned the water and turned to aim at every sound.
“Oh, I don’t think we’ve anything to fear at the moment,” Pullo said. “No one knows we’re here.”
“Meaning no disrespect, Titus Pullo, but that’s what we thought before,” Hannah said. “Before Didymus and his friend showed up.”
“He wasn’t my friend,” Didymus said.
“As you told us,” said the guard.
“You—you don’t think I’m lying, do you?”
“We do not,” Hannah said before the guard could respond. “But you did say that there were more Romans with you. Though I doubt anyone could have survived the trap, we’d rather not take the chance that someone got away and is bringing more Romans to find us. So haste would be best.”
“He’ll come,” Caesarion said, looking back to the sea. His voice sounded quieter than he intended, and he wondered if it showed the doubt in his heart. What if Vorenus didn’t come? What if they’d been arrested at the palace? Or even in the streets? What if they couldn’t crew the ship? God, he hadn’t even thought about—
Hannah’s hand brushed his, breaking his train of thought. He felt her fingertips, light as feathers, interweaving between his own—tentatively at first, but then more solidly confident as he started to respond. He didn’t dare to look over at her as they held hands. He was just happy to feel her close warmth, reassured by her flesh in his.
“I hope your friend’s boat has a private room,” Jacob said, laughing.
Caesarion felt his cheeks blush hot. He felt Hannah’s hand squeeze his. And then, before he could turn to say something to her brother, time slowed into a rush of sound from behind them: something cracking against stone, rapid movements of cloth and leather, the sliding sounds of metal, and then the piercing screams of first Pullo and then Jacob.